Keeping a sleep log with this template will help you get an objective picture of the sleep patterns of your child. It will also allow you to detect whether there is a tendency for sleep patterns to become more regular, or for night wakings to decrease.

The featured image above is an example of how it looks once you start to fill it. It is adapted from the sleep chart of a 6-month-old girl published in Largo and Hunziker, 1984. You can see that in this case, after a behavioral intervention, the irregular sleep/awake pattern turns into a more regular pattern of longer periods of sleep and being awake.

Carole Knibbe is the founder of Familimage.com. She is the mother of a 5-year-old girl and a 2-year-old boy, and the stepmother of a 11-year-old girl. She works at Université Lyon 1, France, as an associate professor in Computational Biology. Probably because of this main occupation as a researcher, she likes to find experimental evidence backing (or disproving!) parenting practices.